It is well known in commerce in general, and in the photofinishing service business in particular as well, to provide incentives to customers to continue use of a particular product or service. These incentives may include, for example, discount coupons or volume discounts. A well-known example of an incentive specific to the photofinishing service business is the practice by some service providers of providing a replacement “free roll of film” to the customer for every roll submitted for processing.
There is another practice, perhaps unique to the photofinishing business, which also serves to create customer satisfaction and loyalty. In a traditional photofinishing service operation, customers are ordinarily assessed a flat rate charge for processing a roll of film (the charge will, however, often depend upon the length of the roll submitted) and then an additional charge for each print made from that roll is added on to the charges for the order. Most photofinishers today can detect if a frame of the film submitted for processing is blank (e.g., the frame either has no exposure on it all, or an overall uniform maximum exposure) and not make a print from blank frames. In some operations, more sophisticated automatic detection means may be applied to detect frames which, while not blank or uniformly fogged, are otherwise unprintable or judged unlikely to make a print the customer would want to have. Thus prints will be made only from those prints judged likely to give good results and the total resulting charges for the photofinishing order then will reflect only the prints actually made. This policy of not making prints from unprintable frames undoubtedly leads to greater customer satisfaction with the photofinishing service received.
A problem not fully addressed by this practice is one which arises from the fact that rolls of film are ordinarily supplied in specific roll lengths, containing fixed numbers of exposures. For example, rolls of 12, 24 or 36 exposures are fairly typical. Often, a user of the film may find there are exposures remaining even though all the photographs desired of a particular event have been made. Confronted by this situation and not wishing to “waste” what is perceived by the user as a valuable resource (in this case unexposed film), the user may resort to a practice of shooting photographs, which may also not be of particular interest at the time. Multiple photographs of the same subject such as a family pet, shot hastily, is a familiar example of this practice. While the customer perhaps realizes she would not have to pay for prints made from blank frames, she nevertheless still views submitting the unexposed frames for processing as wasteful.
More recently cameras have been introduced such as the Kodak Preview™ camera, part of the Advantix™ line of cameras, which while employing film as the capture medium, also captures the image photographed electronically and displays a preview image on an LCD screen on the back of the camera. The photographer is then given a choice to select from the options at photofinishing to order one print from the frame, multiple prints from the frame, or no print at all. In the Kodak Preview™ camera, the instructions to the photofinisher are written to the magnetic recording tracks present on the film. In the instance of a frame where no print is selected, this frame is of course wasted and may not be reused.
With the advent of loyalty accounts and computer-stored databases of customer past purchases and preferences, it is now possible for a photofinishing service provider to set up a photofinishing account for each customer and track total actual usage of photofinishing products and services over time. This capability opens the possibility to provide a method to better address the particular problems described above and thereby to engender even greater satisfaction and loyalty to the provider.